Irish Times critics review Usher at the Point Depot and Jackie Mason at Vicar Street

Usher

Point Depot, Dublin

When a man you've never met before suddenly gives you flowers in front of a couple of thousand screaming people, he's probably a repeat offender. When the man in question is someone who has sold five million copies of his new album in the last few months, you can be sure he's handed out many bouquets of roses with the thorns removed.

The girl plucked from the audience to be serenaded with flowers, a smoochy session on a sofa and a ballad which is one part Julio Iglesias and one part R Kelly, is grinning from ear to ear, but in truth it's R&B's new leading man Raymond Usher who should be doing most of the beaming.

While he may have hit the jackpot with the You Make Me Wanna single back in 1998, it's his current Confessions album which has been throwing hit singles about with the same wild abandon as the ticker-tape which flies from this stage. The album's huge success has elevated the 25-year-old to new heights, giving him access to that exclusive first-name-only pop club where Britney, Justin, Christina, Beyonce and Kelis gather for cocktails and Taytos.

One member of that particular coterie is never far from mind this evening. The slick dance steps, the complex stage-show, the slushy soul, the variety of hats: it's hard to work out if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery or if Usher paid a little too much attention to Justin Timberlake's tour last year.

Usher is a much more old-fashioned proposition than Timberlake. While there's the occasional abandoned T-shirt, the odd rummage in spacious tracksuit bottoms and some fleeting bump and grind with his dancers, there is little you could term X-rated or raunchy about the show.

When it comes to the performance, Usher hits high notes like Marvin Gaye and inflates his stock of syrupy ballads with Barry White-like exaggeration. Largely about Usher getting a hard time from his girl or having a hard time getting a girl, the songs are polished, smooth and not a little smug. Lacking any sort of excitement or verve, they are the kind of tracks which tend to give modern soul music a bad name.

But Usher does possess potential for much more and this gushes forth with considerable brio from Yeah, an energetic electro stomper with a nagging melody. It suggests Usher could really cause a musical scene if he wanted to, but that might involve upsetting what seems to be a successful formula.

For now, the only real spectacle on show is the artist going up and down on a series of hydraulic lifts while wearing a succession of interesting hats ­ that's right, a mix of elevator music and old hat.

Jim Carroll

Jackie Mason

Vicar Street

"I did a show in Israel and I was a sensation. Two weeks later, in Egypt, the same jokes . . ." Legendary New York stand-up Jackie Mason gave an expressive shrug. His best-known album is Politically Incorrect, and that's also the title of the show he brought to Vicar Street. Along with Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, the former Rabbi, now in his seventies, is a great survivor of that brilliant flowering of wry, self-deprecating Jewish humour in the 1960s.

While one felt privileged to see him live in Dublin, it has to be said that his attitudes remain rooted in the 1960s: he's not debunking the ludicrous and dangerous excesses of today's political correctness (which certainly needs doing) but functioning in a pre-correctness world, as if the phenomenon has somehow passed him by.

So he delivered irony-free diatribes against the French, gay people, and, especially, women. He was particularly angry about women who stay at home lazing around all day and contributing nothing to the household budget and then divorce the guy and take his house and half his income off him. He also did a routine about how girls won't sleep with you on the first date, but by the second they're gagging for it. And about how Indian taxi-drivers talk funny and you can't understand them.

So if the material disappointed, what were we left with? Plenty, actually. Mason's command of the stage was quite awesome, as was his skill at dealing with hecklers. His routines had great rhythm and precision. But, for me, a masterclass in immaculate comedy technique didn't compensate for the essential sourness of the material.

Stephen Dixon